Finding personal data such as audio, video and image files on one's personal computing device can be difficult. This is especially true for files that a user has created. In most cases when a user uploads his personal image and audio files to his personal computing device, he does not bother to annotate his files with metadata that can serve to locate his files on his computing device using a search engine. This is because annotating such data files by hand is time consuming and tedious.
It is possible to locate and identify the content of a file by using content-based analysis. However, content-based search of multimedia data such as photographs, audio and video files is often slow and unreliable due to computationally expensive and inaccurate content analysis algorithms.